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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26577181">Rain and Lightning in the Storm Underground</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/henghost/pseuds/henghost'>henghost</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>My (non-fan)Fiction [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Original Work</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>F/F, Politics, Superheroes, Terrorism</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:41:34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,774</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26577181</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/henghost/pseuds/henghost</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The Storm Underground, one of America's first superpowered terrorist organizations, breaks up. And so do two of its members.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Original Female Character/Original Female Character</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>My (non-fan)Fiction [4]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1840654</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Rain and Lightning in the Storm Underground</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is adapted to stand on its own from a part of my Worm fanfiction, "Panem et Circenses."</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Issue #290 of </span>
  <em>
    <span>The Uncanny X-Men</span>
  </em>
  <span> features on its cover a portrait of Ororo "Storm" Munroe. She looks up at the sky with white eyes and white hair and a severe expression while spiderweb lightning crackles down all around her and opal rain splashes against her dark skin. Storm, for the uninitiated, is a mutant with the power to manipulate the weather. To wield it as a weapon. Mavis has more than once remarked to Victoria that with all that power -- she can use a lightning bolt as a goddamn </span>
  <em>
    <span>sword</span>
  </em>
  <span> for Chrissake! -- it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to, well, for example, seize state power, take over an island or something. Why doesn't she? If she's devoted to justice, why doesn't she try? "Because it's propaganda, Mavis," says Victoria each time she asks. Mavis doesn't like to hear that. Mavis has the biggest crush on Storm -- she doesn't like to be reminded that she's fictional. She carries around Issue #290 the way real nutjobs might carry around a </span>
  <em>
    <span>Book of Mormon.</span>
  </em>
  <span> A first edition, too. Condition: mint.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It's 2008. Power fantasies like this are rampant. Politics means something different now than it did only a few months now, at least for the five of them. They need all the power they can get. Sometimes when Victoria slips in civvies through the Ann Arbor streets, spotting on each block a new bundle of coats and rags and cardboard, she can see where Mavis is coming from. But not always. She loves her to death but sometimes her vision goes all red (no pun intended).</span>
</p><p>
  <span>#</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The night of the assassination Mavis goes on another one of her electrifying rants. They've got the body strung up from a sycamore in a clearing somewhere on the outskirts of town, and Mavis paces before it -- him -- and yells with an affected timbre. In other words, it is not her own voice. She is conscious of her place within the tradition. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>She's saying, "Mao Tse Tung once said: 'Within me are a monkey and a tiger.' Today, comrades, we embodied the tiger. Today we got one step closer to our ultimate goal, which is the emancipation of all mankind..."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>They've all heard it before. No one dares interrupt, of course, even Victoria, and instead of really listening the audience watches the body (it belongs to one Hank Hawk) list back and forth idly against the silver-black starlight. The swastikas like broken snakes across his forearms seem empty, somehow. Against pink flesh they seemed powerful. Now against gray they're like smashed bulbs. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mavis is still going: "We're the New New Left. You know that, don't you? It'll be us who smashes the State -- the imperialist, white supremacist, evil evil evil State -- that's our destiny. This swinging scum up here's proof. We're a force to be reckoned with. We are strong. Only five of us and already this settler-State is quivering with fear. Already the --"</span>
</p><p><span>"Hey give it a rest maybe, Mavis," says Charles Nelms, also known by his </span><em><span>nom de guerre,</span></em> <span>Blackstar. Mavis looks for a second like she'll punish his poor humor by breaking his humerus in two (as she has done before) but her face softens soon enough. Blackstar's known for his mild manners, is perhaps the reason she doesn't retaliate. Anyone else and there would've had to be restraints put in place.</span></p><p>
  <span>"Fine," says Mavis. "Let's end. </span>
  <em>
    <span>We don't need no superheroes to tell us of our power!</span>
  </em>
  <span>"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"</span>
  <em>
    <span>We don't need no superheroes to tell us of our power!</span>
  </em>
  <span>" the four of them answer in unison.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Just then the body jumps. His legs kick and jerk. Amanda screams, and the others jump to their feet, but then Mavis is giggling, and when they see her the rest of them burst out giggling as well: It's only Mavis's electromagnetic ability pulsing through the corpse to recreate that old frog's legs experiment. She pulls out a miniature radio from some secret fold and fiddles with it until out comes </span>
  <em>
    <span>Fortunate Son.</span>
  </em>
  <span> It's a mixtape of protest music from the days of the war in Vietnam. She grabs Victoria's hand and lifts her to her feet and swirls her around, and the others grab partners or simply shimmy to themselves. The corpse joins in with more electric help. Mavis dips Victoria and kisses her, and when she brings her back up the body's boot collides with her temple, and they have a good chuckle and kiss again and dance and dance until finally they are pulling their clothes into the grass with frantic aggression and tripping and tumbling into the shadowy forest....</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The assassination was not quite as easy as the group had anticipated. Victoria, always wary of violence no matter how "justified," made the five of them rehearse the plan several times in their base of operations, which sat in an abandoned barn beside Lake Erie. It'd all gone out the window, though, when they showed up at the rally. It happened in the blink of an eye: Mavis went first, blew out the bulbs above the sweaty young men dressed either in leathers and motorcycle helmets or khakis and crew-cuts, which set them screaming. Then Amanda's turn (that's Amanda Braithwaite, also known as Snakewhip) grew the surrounding bushes (some of them literally in the shape of an iron cross or that metal-looking eagle). Blackstar got ol' John-Henry up close to the man in question (Blackstar's teleportation makes a noise like: </span>
  <em>
    <span>zhorp!</span>
  </em>
  <span>), but this is where the preparation fell through. Hank Hawk, also known as Mr. Eighty-Eight, apparently prepared for an event like this, took off sprinting through a labyrinthine getaway path.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It took them the remainder of the night to track him through the tick-filled Midwest thicket. And when they finally got him he was too exhausted even to kick as they lynched him. Secretly Victoria was relieved -- in the original blueprint it would've been up to her to crush him between liquid walls lifted from the lake. She's done it before but still the sensation of squeezing someone's life out is one that'll show up in your nightmares.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>It's not their first rodeo on the assassination front. Only last month they took down local slumlord Jerry LaRue. Victoria had complained after that one. "Pointless violence," she said. "A wasted life." Maybe she had a point, but in the end Mavis had wanted to do it and Victoria was powerless to resist her. Similar story with Mr. Eighty-Eight here, but arguments in favor of pacifism were harder to justify in this case because, well, if anyone deserved to die...</span>
</p><p>
  <span>#</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Later on, laid nude and shimmering on a prickly layer of pine-needles and damp red leaves, Mavis says to Victoria, "It's not enough." In the air is sweat and the fetid scents of decomposition. Above, big dark clouds have eaten the moon. It's black black black in every direction. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Stop, Mavis."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"What? It's true."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"It is but there's nothing we can do about it. Forget it. Let's sleep."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"I could snap my goddamn fingers and this city would be </span>
  <span>dust,</span>
  <span> Victoria. And what are we doing? We're offing some small-time bigot. I don't need to tell you that's not going to do shit, Victoria. We'll be lucky to make some local leftist zine. It's nothing. It's an absolute drop in the bucket. If we're going--"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Mavis."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"No -- listen. In fact it's your duty to listen. I'm the leader. I know what I'm doing. And what--"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Hold on. Leader? You sound like Pol fucking Pot. This is what I'm saying, Mavis, you're talking about some kind of Red Terror. You're angry, which is good, but the world's not a wire to fry. These are lives you're talking about. Real human lives."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Don't get sentimental now, Victoria, not about this. This is violence we're talking about. Our role is to be dispassionate. Our role is to take violence back. You don't know what it's like. You've gone through life with white skin and daddy's money and everything to look forward to. You're Ayers and I'm Hampton. You have the luxury of a conscience. I'm thinking about the future, and if you want to talk about 'real human lives' then let's talk about them. You're forgetting, Victoria, about all those real human lives you're trying to </span>
  <em>
    <span>save</span>
  </em>
  <span> by engaging in this salon revolutionary hobby of yours -- they're who I'm talking about. They're the whole fucking point."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"You're right. Of course you're right. I'm just asking you to </span>
  <em>
    <span>relax,</span>
  </em>
  <span> Mavis. Now," getting to hands and knees with the plastic-wrap crinkle of fallen foliage, "I heard you should never go to bed angry." And then pounces full-force.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Have you considered the non-combat utility of liquid manipulation abilities?</span>
</p><p>
  <span>#</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The Storm Underground formed among front pages depicting graphs with lines which plunged straight down into the gaping maw of hell, when  then University of Michigan student Mavis Davids, at the time knee-deep in Marx, Lenin, Fanon, et al., was beginning to see the futility in simple electoral politics. This fact, plus the recent advent of her superpowers, propelled her head-first into the world of left-wing militancy. No need for arms other than her own two fleshy ones, which contained millions of volts, plus those of four other newly superpowered classmates. Blasts of synthesized lightning, walls of lake-water, living leaves, superstrength, and fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>teleportation!</span>
  </em>
  <span> -- now this was direct action at its finest. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Mavis's X-Woman idol reached a synthesis with their terroristic precursor, the Weathermen of the '70s -- sorry, </span>
  <em>
    <span>Weather Underground;</span>
  </em>
  <span> women hold up half the sky, after all -- and thus the newest branch of the fight against tyranny was born. Updated from those New Left guerillas' conception: this time multiracial, this time small and manageable, this time free of provocateurs. Class traitors, race traitors, and plain old proletarians had to work together in times like these. They wasted no time in getting to the good part. That is, getting to the destruction.</span>
</p><p><span>First up: recreating the famous bombing of the pig memorial in Haymarket. Mavis knew just the target. Along the gray shores of Lake Erie lay a tall bronze bust of a porcine officer, dedicated to all those who "protect and serve." They </span><em><span>zhorped!</span></em> <span>into the vicinity, clad all in black in red, and Victoria raised a big curtain of water into the air and Mavis zapped it into steam, which expanded so quickly it ripped like shrapnel through the statue. Afterward they ran through the metal hail and siren wails cackling with one another. They found an abandoned barn-house in the nearby patch of woods, and the rest is history.</span></p><p>
  <span>In fact, that night Mavis and Victoria had their first kiss. Reclined along the bank of a canal they talked through till morning, and by the amber dawn light they rolled toward each other on the damp grass and pressed their lips together, which induced so much anxiety in Victoria she lifted the murky canal-water into the sky and let it topple onto their heads. They stayed soaked all day.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The day after the assassination they've returned to the scene of that original crime. Why? Well, the governor's been calling for Law and Order, and part of this initiative (apparently) has been to rebuild that hideous statue. Which leaves the SU with only one option, of course. The sky's gone the color and texture of a tattered white flag, and over the horizon you can see huge sheets of rain accompanied by gossamer scars of lightning plunging into the great lake. The water is lit with a network of electric energy. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Let's do it quick," says Mavis, and her fingers crackle. With that, Victoria lifts an oozing dripping lump of Lake Erie skyward, and from Mavis's palms comes more power, upwards of three million volts. It makes a sound like switching between channels on an old TV times a million. The brand new monument breaks into a trillion rust-colored shards, and they watch the pieces fly into the street and cheer. (Perhaps, however, their cheer is not quite as strong as it was that first time around. Now that you mention it, Mavis isn't cheering at all.)</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Then right as the teleportation takes effect Victoria sees coming out from behind a building what looks like a construction crew. Like they knew.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Back in the barn Mavis paces and scowls. The others twiddle their thumbs and watch her, afraid of what she'll do if they try and leave. Finally she pulls out her mini radio and flicks it on and places it with a thunk on the dirty hardwood floor. It's turned to NPR. Someone with a buzzing voice is going: "...Just earlier today President Corgill confirmed he would not pursue legal action against Wall Street executives." Mavis performs a sort of flourish and the radio bursts into a plume of bitter-smelling smoke. Her comrades wince. Mavis says, "FUCK!"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"You thought he would?" says Victoria.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"No. Absolutely not. It's just all so hopeless. What are we doing?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"We're </span>
  <em>
    <span>helping</span>
  </em>
  <span> people, Mavis," goes Blackstar.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"No we absolutely fucking aren't. We just spent the day blowing up a goddamn statue. Who's that helping? Is it going to inspire the people to insurrection? Will it move the dial in terms of the number of people suffering even a millimeter? No. Of course not. They'll rebuild it in a week. No one will see what we did. Nothing will change. All you want to be 'militant'. You want to be a 'vanguard'. Then what the fuck are you all doing? What are </span>
  <em>
    <span>we</span>
  </em>
  <span> doing?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"So what's the answer, Mavis?" goes Victoria. "What do you want us to do?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Let's get out of this shitty fucking city. Let's go to Washington. Or New York. If we're going to be militant we may as well be </span>
  <em>
    <span>militant,</span>
  </em>
  <span> you see what I'm saying?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>For a moment the only sound's the whisper of slow spring air against the lush green outside. Some throat-clearing here and there. Victoria looks at the ground and scowls and pulls out the weeds which have sprung like demons from out between the floorboards. Mavis glares down at them with the fury of a deity. No one can meet her gaze. Finally she scoffs and stomps out of the barn into the balmy daytime. It takes Victoria longer than it should to go after her.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>#</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Victoria knew Mavis at UMich before all the Underground stuff. They had a Political Science class together. For the longest time they'd speak about assignments or the weather (ha ha) but never more than that.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The change came when they were listening to a lecture and the lights in the half-empty hall went to pieces and bathed the place in darkness. Victoria would've bought the freak accident narrative if not for the little whisper she caught from Mavis, who sat a row below her: "Shit." Certainly scared swearing was everywhere at this time, but something about the way she said it stuck with Victoria. She'd developed her own Power the summer before this, her freshman year, and still didn't quite believe it. Not that she used it often. If the wrong person found out, she knew, in no time flat there'd be a black van with flowers on the side lurking by her dorm. They'd take her to the goddamn </span>
  <span>military!</span>
  <span> And although this was before her "radicalization" she knew that would not be an ideal place for her. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Which is to say: she recognized the fear contained within that little "Shit".</span>
</p><p>
  <span>The next class together Victoria leaned down and spoke into Mavis's ear with a tone to indicate she </span>
  <span>knew</span>
  <span>. They met in a little alcove of campus and Victoria told her she was going through something similar. (In vague language, of course, in case she was wrong.) And well there was some amount gut-spilling and what do you know they hit it off. Turns out not too many superhumans in the Midwest. Mavis was never quiet about her beliefs. She gave Victoria some books to read, and when she read them (Mavis's grinning face in her head the whole while) it felt like the world had grown wings. It felt for the first time like it all </span>
  <span>meant </span>
  <span>something.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Victoria could've gotten into a school a little more New England than UMich, but had chosen the frozen north instead to get as far (culturally) from fucking San Francisco and her plastic goddamn mom and dad as she dared. There was some iciness at first, of course. She'd experienced quite the change in environment in more ways than one. But with Mavis, well -- being with Mavis came with a kind of heat. Heat hot enough to thaw out Victoria's mouse-heart. So blinded by this heat was she, in fact, that she allowed herself to get dragged into one of America's first superpowered terrorist organizations.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Now Victoria's gone after Mavis. She finds her where else but the site of their first kiss, leafing through her faithful Issue #290. "Victoria," says Mavis without looking up. Victoria can see she's been crying. She sits on the damp grass beside her. The sky's black above them and soon it will spill rain, as if in solidarity.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Let me tell you a story," says Mavis, and snaps the comic shut with a little </span>
  <span>fwip</span>
  <span>. "When I was ten I lived in a town I'm sure you've never heard of in an especially empty part of South Carolina. I don't really remember much about it. One night, however, I remember in perfect clarity. I remember waking up in the darkness to the sound of thumps and yelling. I remember getting up and clutching my stuffed bear and shuffling through my tiny little shack of a house. I saw men in hoods with white skin and guns arranged in a circle around my father. And what could I have done, Victoria? I crouched behind the door and watched. I watched them put the barrel down his throat. I watched them pull the trigger not once not twice but three times. I watched them laugh at his corpse and clap each other on the back and high-fucking-five. These days that's the only thing I can remember about my father.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Anyway the conclusion to this story comes a few years later, after my mother and brother and I had moved to Chicago. When I was sick with my burgeoning Power. It manifested fully, this electric </span>
  <span>thing</span>
  <span> of mine, around the summer before my junior year of high school. And that same summer I stole my mom's old Corolla and drove down to my hometown. Oh I was something of sleuth prodigy, Victoria. It took me no time at all to track down those men, whose faces had been burned into the black of my eyelids. And when I found them it was the easiest thing in the world to wreak havoc in their respective nervous systems and throw them in my mom's trunk and lug them somewhere no one would hear them scream. Then, Victoria, one by one, I heated the blood in their veins until they glowed crimson, and then further, at which point they'd pop like a sticky red water balloon. Three times. Again and again and again."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Mavis..."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"That's what's in my head, Victoria. That's what I'm considering when I say I want to go to D.C. Here, it's all just names. It's Guevara and Storm and Sankara and Wolverine and Malcolm and Professor fucking X. It's icons in my head. It's theory and history and comics and nothing at all. There's all this shit inside me and what we're doing here isn't helping to get it the fuck </span>
  <em>
    <span>out.</span>
  </em>
  <span>"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"You're going to go, aren't you?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"I am. There's nothing here for me anymore."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>And when she says it all at once the canal is lifted like a solid up between them and the staticky wet sky where it hovers spectrally for moments before Victoria brings it down, the glittering mud-diamond mass, on the two of them. It's a Great Flood. After some gasping and sputtering the aftermath can be seen: Issue #290 lies dripping on the sodden grass, oozing its four-color ink like rainbow blood.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Sorry," says Victoria. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>"I deserved it."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"Mavis, you can't go. You did deserve it," -- weeping now, shoving Mavis to the ground and unconsciously summoning a whirlpool of droplets around herself -- "You can't go. They'll kill you, Mavis. You know they will. There are laws in place now. The full weight of their new super-military will come after you and you won't stand a chance. You know that. You'll die, Mavis."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"I know. Hey, quit. I know. So will you come with me?"</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"I can't. Of course I can't."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>"I know. C'mere."</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Victoria drops to the mire below and crawls to Mavis and wraps her arms around her and lifts her tears away. This is the last time they will really be together, and they know it. In this final moment it's like a tsunami around a tesla coil: explosive, angry, impossible. They make it last as long as they can stand.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>Victoria thinks that if Mavis is Storm, then she's Rogue, destined to kill everything she touches.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>#</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When the five of them regroup there's a splitting into factions. What is it with these leftists and </span>
  <em>
    <span>factions?</span>
  </em>
  <span> Amanda and Strong John-Henry pack up for their trip, and Blackstar and Victoria watch on idly and try to remain strong. Victoria's having a tough time with this. You can every so often catch her raising a teardrop up to the bare bulbs above them, where it sizzles into mist. They'll leave as soon as it gets dark. There's no time to waste when the stakes are this high. </span>
</p><p>
  <span>Victoria's thinking about what she'll do now. There's no point in staying a superhero. Maybe she'll finish her degree. Or go back to San Francisco. Either way it's a step back. Without Mavis she's not strong. Certainly not strong enough to effect any kind of change. So it's back to a life without struggle, a life in the suburbs, a life with a husband -- Jesus, really? -- and little kids, a boy and a girl, and grocery stores and 401ks and online shopping and fucking </span>
  <em>
    <span>brunch.</span>
  </em>
  <span> That's what she deserves, in the end.</span>
</p><p>
  <span>When the moon comes out, watery and reflective, Mavis and Victoria hug one last time, and Victoria sniffs her neck to try and capture the scent in her head for eternal storage, although she knows she'll have forgotten it in a week. Then they're off, headed for the nation's capital, for freedom, for death. And the storm follows them the whole way, showering them first with rain and then with lightning.</span>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Feedback encouraged and appreciated :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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